Those people are legendary. A bunch of nerds singlehandedly defeating a multi-billions dollars business. I have an M1 for work, if they can manage for Asahi Linux to take advantage of the GPU, I will do 90% of my work on Linux.
if they can manage for Asahi Linux to take advantage of the GPU
Umm, it already does for quite a while now (at least for regular usage). The work they’re currently doing will enable people to play games and other GPU-intensive work.
Wow what a neat project, I have spent a lot of time recently working around vulkan on m1 machines with compatibility layers and while it’s not a huge pain it does suck to miss out on some of the more powerful features of vulkan that the hardware is certainly capable of. I’m not keen on learning metal to bridge the gap and this is just what the doctor ordered.
Hard to imagine a Linux user would want to run anything on hardware that costs a fortune and is also completely and intentionally unupgradeable and irreparable…
Much less that they would go to such great lengths to bring such software into existence.
Easy to imagine when you understand that this is developed to support hardware that is widely popular and that will be sold by a lot less in the second-hand market in a couple of years, and that this makes far easier for people that are currently stuck in this walled garden to experiment with free software.
True, but the M1 MacBooks have really taken a beating in price. And the Airs were already quite a good deal to start with, so they do still seem competitive (8GB RAM notwithstanding). Been using a base model air since launch, and unless I hit swap super hard (I rarely do) it’s still great :)
There’s not a whole lot of good options for decent ARM PCs and the M1s are legitimately pretty good machines, repairability aside.
Even if you can’t repair them at least it’s pretty much guaranteed they can at least have their OS upgraded to a libre one. There’s going to be millions of them on the used market in a few years for cheap.
I have zero complaints about the hardware of my work provided MacBook Pro, very nice machine to use overall.
Are they the best bang for the buck? No. But Linux isn’t just about getting as much as possible for as little money as possible. Not everyone wants to daily drive an old bulky ThinkPad because it’s free-er. I’m happy with my framework but the battery life, keyboard and touchpad are quite inferior compared to my work MacBook. I wouldn’t buy one for myself, but I can recognize it’s still a nice machine and it’s much better than whatever crap Microsoft is pushing out with its Surface line.
Meh, if just wanting a lightweight laptop that’s fast even when unplugged there’s people who would be OK paying $700 for a M1 MBAir or a bit more for a 16GB version. They’re great laptops, the Rust compiler is very fast on M1/2 and with no fan noise. If buying Apple Refurbished they’re like new.
I’m on a refurb M2 Air that I picked up from Apple for peanuts. It took me about 15m to get NixOS running on the thing, and it’s going to last me for 10 years, if my old MBP is anything to go by.
Also, regardless of the hardware politics, I’m not sure I’ve been in awe of a project as much as I have the Asahi team. They’re just doing so much so quickly and with such command of the subject … and they’re so young. It’s a joy to watch them work.
Traces of the Rust work gets merged in every version. They come in small pieces, and now the next version has even more abstractions that are needed for the M1 GPU driver to eventually get there.
Uh, no, because women are underrepresented in the software industry and there’s a clear bias against non-males in this area. Only 5% of developers identify as female[1].
I only meant to celebrate diversity, and give a fuck you to this techbro society. I hope more non-males tune in to Asahi Lina’s livestreams and realize to not give up an interest in programming because of their gender.
Exactly this. And it shows a good example for other underrepresented genders that there are others too in the field and they are absolutely amazing; seriously in the top 1% of the devs.
There is no proof to be a bias against non-male in the programming world. As far as I know, any country regardless of their gender equality effort up to a certain point have basically the same women to men ratio, which means it isn’t the action of some oppression or shaming. Worse, countries that are less egalitarian are a more equal ratio of women and men, like India, as opposed to a lot of western countries. It’ll never change unless you manage to brainwash a good amount of women into thinking they like programming, despite them not liking it.
any country regardless of their gender equality effort up to a certain point have basically the same women to men ratio, which means it isn’t the action of some oppression or shaming.
Sexism is not constrained to a single nationality, and the patriarchy is international.
Maybe you’re not aware, but what you just posted was a misogynistic screed. Do better.
I would love to see Apple go down the route of actually supporting modern OpenGL and Vulkan on their hardware. The hardware is amazing but forcing software to rely on Metal just holding it back especially when it comes to games.
Because people treat apple as if it's the pinnacle of design, performance, and usability. People who want to game on their hardware should have it so hard that they will take anything they can to make that possible on that hardware. If Linux becomes that thing that makes it all possible, so much so that it becomes common knowledge "if you want to game on a mac, install linux", then finally some fruit worshippers could possibly see what surrounds them instead of their myopic view of their fruit god.
Mac missed the gaming train two decades ago.
It's never too late for a corporation of their size to wake up one day and decide "well, now there's some kind of a reason to make gaming on mac possible". I can only hope that if they're pushed to that, that linux is so far ahead that it becomes difficult to get back their followers. If by some miracle Valve decides to invest in making linux work on mac, there would be two giants in the game.
Well, they sort of support Vulkan via a translation layer called MoltenVK. This is how the Dolphin emulator was able to get GameCube games running on M1, for example.
That’s probably the most that Mac users will get, unfortunately - the only games that Apple will care about are the ones exclusive to their Apple Arcade service, which will therefore use the Metal API anyway…
It’s certainly a great read and is worthwhile, however I fundamentally disagree with the base premise that the goal of a federated system is to be uniformly distributed.
Why should an instance focused on a niche topic have the same representation as a general instance? Why should either have the same representation as one with abhorrent content?
Choosing your instance is effectively a statement that you agree with the mission of the particular instance. The number of low user instances demonstrates that there are a great number of people that share the author’s vision of federation.
Because small instances tend to die out in the long run. You can see this with OpenID. OpenID promised us, the users, a way to have one set of credentials to login everywhere. But years later you go to a new site and all you can set are just three options: Facebook, Google and Apple.
Choosing your instance which is not a top dog means that some day you’ll have to migrate. So if you’re smart enough you just sign up for the biggest instance from the start. And that will only speed up the decline of small instances.
Basically it said to be a true decentralized system people have to be spread equally through the system so the power distribution is equal and not concentrated on one part of the system.
So mastodon is not truly decentralized because a lot of the users are on 3 instances. Also that’s where the fallacy lies - because people choose to be part of the larger instances
As long as the technology is not accessible to everyone from old folks to 5 year olds, the power is concentrated to those who understand and maintain it.
I don’t really agree with this article. The argument seems to rest on the idea that a representative democracy is a compromise on direct democracy. In reality, even though I have the ability to meaningfully participate in every election a direct democracy would entail, I have no desire to because I have other things I would rather spend my time doing.
Similarly, even if I have the ability to run my own instance (admittedly I do not, but many of us early adopters do), I do not want to. I’m happy to let other people do it as long as those people seem like broadly agree with my morals. I don’t need an close relationship, just a trustful one. This digital forum inherently has even better benefits than real life; if I realize I dislike my current instance, I have the option to move to another instance or create my own. In real life I can only move to another district or hope to vote out my current rep.
The author seems to be injecting their own version of what they want federated software to be on top of what the fediverse is.
It’s not the panacea that will break the capitalist oligopoly and bring about The Revolution.
It doesn’t require an idealized future where ever person is tech literate enough to host their own email server.
It’s not a system for close friends to congregate in small social circles.
It could be a lot of those things, but the author is projecting. It’s software that is decentralized, can be connected to willing partners, and each instance has the freedom to set their own rules about who they do and don’t communicate with. The author seems to be adding their ideal goal of what the software should be to what it is.
I agree with him that there is inevitably a strong tendency toward centralization, but I think a key feature to help with that would be the portability of one’s account to new instances. Even if the majority of users are in only a few instances, there is still a safeguard against one entity (I.e. corporation) directing the health of the whole system. If accounts were portable, when an instance went foul, people could move and the system as a whole would self-heal.
Nonetheless, it’s an interesting article. And the cost and challenges of running a web scale service are not conducive to small time players.
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